Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Will Stellarium 10.5 work without open GL? I currently have Stellarium 10.1 running on my machine - but I have to use windows to run it. If only there was a 10.1 for puppy, I wouldn't have to run Windows at all.

When I try to run 10.6 in Puppy5.2,I get a "no open GL support" error message. I guess a new video card that supports Open GL is in order?

Thanks emil. I was just about to buy a new video card. I went to the driver menu in Quickpet and downloaded an updated driver. Stellarium now works! It loads quite a bit faster than the Windows version, too.

To install
Install these files (click on the downloaded file and follow Puppy's prompts) in this order, it's probably best to reboot after each one too.

libc6, libstdc++, stellarium and finally Qt4.

I found that QT4 must be installed after Stellarium or it won't run, this seems wrong but is the case for me.

Running Stellarium
There should now be an entry under Menu > Programs > Fun for Stellarium which should run it but with a couple of quirks for anyone who has used it before.

Firstly: The programme opens in an apparently fixed part screen window without the pop-out tool bars at the base and left side or a title bar. To fix it: press the F11 key, the tool bars appear and the display will switch between full screen and windowed with the mouse button or F11 as it should.

Secondly: dialogues such as the one to set the observer's location don't accept keyboard input with the programme full screen but do when windowed so I just set things up while windowed then changed to full screen for the best display.

Last notes
Pmusic seems to be broken by doing this installation as it crashes part way through playing mp3 files. As Mplayer and Gxine both still seem to work OK and I'm not that interested in multimedia stuff I haven't followed this up but it might be fixable. Anyone who needs music and video stuff on the same computer had better test carefully that all their apps still work right.

I installed the 0.10.4 pet first, which showed some bugs [tested only jwm] :

1. The left bottom sidebar showed only three contents
2. The left bottom bar did not show at all
3. jwm did not create a window frame , had been splash all the time
4. Therefore apparently F11 toggling fullscreen did not work, froze the computer, had to do hard poweroff
5. Also Control+q to leave the program froze my system (intel dual core@2,6GHz;4GB Ram)

The 0.10.6 version runs OK .

I am not a big supporter of updates and upgrades, but in this case it is really essential .

Additional NOTE : The Stellarium .pet s come with qt-4.6.2 . I had qt-4.3.2 already installed , and did not run ldconfig, so libQtcore.so still points to libQtcore.so.4.3.2 while libQtcore.so.4 got upgraded to point to libQtcore.so.4.6.2 (and same for all the other Qt4 libs) .

Stellarium is proud to announce the second correcting release in series 0.13.x - v0.13.2, which contains over 70 closed bugs and includes some wishes and new features, like visualization of the zodiacal light and new sky cultures. There is also a new release of series 0.12.x - v0.12.5 with backported features from series 0.13.x. A huge thanks to our community, whose contributions help to make Stellarium better! See our SourceForge site for a link to the complete list of changes. Download Stellarium now.